Lacanian Analysis of Harold Pinter's the Birthday Party

Abstract

In this article my aim is to show how Harold Pinter's play The Birthday Party can be read through Lacanian lens. Both of them prioritize language. Lacan emphasizes on the centrality of language and how language dominates the characters in their different stages –the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. I will try to show how the characters of the play become the victims of language and how they are entrapped in the three stages for their misrecognition or misinterpretation of language. Their gradual change in the process of need, demand and desire is also a vital point of this paper.